Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Madeleine is wide awake in her new room. The sheets are nervous. They don’t recognize these walls either. The pillow is stiff, no one can relax around here. The moon pours through the naked window that overlooks the grassy circle out back. She resists the urge to suck her thumb. She quit two years ago, bribed by Maman and Tante Yvonne with a brunette Barbie doll. Madeleine quit cold turkey, not because she wanted a Barbie but because she didn’t, and it was so nice and so sad of Maman to think she was buying something special for her little girl. Madeleine pretended to be thrilled with the doll, who still lives in the pink satin-lined closet she came in. Sleeps there in her wedding dress, like a vampire. All Madeleine wants for Christmas is a set of six-guns and holsters. Girls never get anything good.

She has to pee. She gets up and creeps across to the bathroom with Bugs. Sits him down facing away from the toilet. Her pee sounds loud in the empty bathroom. She flushes the toilet — Niagara Falls — closes it, climbs onto the lid and looks out the window. Across the street, the porch light is on at the purple house. The wheelchair is gone, but beneath the light and its halo of mosquitoes sits a girl. Next to her lies the German shepherd dog, asleep. The girl should be asleep too, do her parents know she is not in bed? Is she allowed to be out in the middle of the night? And is she allowed to play with that knife? She has a stick and she’s whittling it. Sharpening it.

THE NEXT MORNING, Madeleine saw the empty wheelchair again through the bathroom window. “Dad, whose wheelchair is that?”

He glanced out the window and said, “Beats me.” And the two of them resumed shaving.

Her technique is identical to his, the only difference being that his razor makes a lovely sandpapery sound as it moves down his cheek while her razor, not containing a blade, is silent.

They wiped their faces with their towels and applied Old Spice.

At breakfast, Mimi told Jack that the kids were frightened of that big dog across the street—“No we’re not,” said Madeleine—“and all the junk in that driveway gets in my nerves.” She wanted him to go over there and find out what was with that family.

“I’ll bet they’re perfectly nice,” he said over his newspaper. “Just a bit eccentric.”

“I had enough eccentric at home, merci , that’s why I married you, Monsieur, to get away from eccentric.” She caught the toast as it popped.

Now Madeleine crouches behind the confetti bushes at the foot of her front lawn as her father crosses the street. The wheelchair is gone again. Tools lie scattered in the driveway next to the old wreck that sits on blocks, hood up. She curls her hands into a spyglass and watches her father knock at the screen door. What if the door opens and a long green tentacle comes out and yanks him inside? What if the person who answers the door looks perfectly normal but is really from another planet and is merely disguised as a human being? What if Dad is merely disguised as Dad and my real dad is being held prisoner on another planet? What if everyone is an alien except me and they are all merely pretending to be normal?

The door opens. A man with a dark curly beard shakes hands with Dad. A man with a beard. In a frilly apron. Of all the strangest things you could possibly see on an air force base.

Her father disappears into the purple house and Madeleine comes out from behind the bushes. Should she go after him? Should she tell her mother? She returns to her lemonade stand at the foot of the driveway. “Two cents,” says the sign. In her empty pickle jar, nine pennies. Mike said, “Make mine a double, bartender.” And Roy Noonan paid a nickel and let her keep the change. All the other kids are either too little to have money, or too old to take notice of her. After a while, two girls her own age stop and one says, “I hope you’re washing those cups.” Girly girls.

When Dad comes out he’ll buy three and she’ll have fifteen cents. Enough for a candy necklace, two Pixy Stix and two Kraft caramels, with plenty left over.

Jack’s neighbour stands almost at attention, his posture an absurd contrast with his full-length frilly apron; its print faded and freshly grease-stained, it protects an immaculate long-sleeved white shirt and narrow black tie.

“Hi, I’m your neighbour, Jack McCarthy.”

The man nods formally. “Froelich,” he says, and sticks out his hand. It would not take a rocket scientist to figure out that Froelich is not military personnel. They shake hands. “Perhaps you wonder about the dog. He is harmless.”

“That’s nice,” says Jack, “but I’m just here to say hello.” Adding, with a grin, “Wie geht’s, Herr Froelich?”

Froelich hesitates, then, “You take a coffee, yes?” He does not wait for a reply, but turns and heads for the kitchen at the rear of the small house. Jack waits in the vestibule. A carved wooden sign hangs by the door: “Willkommen.” A record is playing in the living room; Jimmy Durante sounds crystal clear, Jack looks around the corner to see what kind of hi-fi it is — Telefunken, same as his own. Eat an apple every day, take a nap at three… . Jack whistles along under his breath and glances about. To his right, a heaped laundry basket on the stairs. In the living room, newspapers crest up against a worn armchair, toys litter the floor, which is covered by a dusty Persian rug smudged with dog hair. In the middle of it all, a playpen where two babies in diapers bounce rattles and a teething ring against the head of an older child who sits facing away from Jack. A girl, judging from the hair, not long but not short either — the extent of Jack’s lexicon of feminine coiffure. A guitar leans in one corner, a coffee table is piled with magazines and books — one in particular catches his eye. He can smell something cooking — the simmer of an all-day soup at nine in the morning.

Froelich reappears with two mugs. “Cheers,” he says.

“Prost,” replies Jack.

“Please to call me Henry.”

Madeleine is relieved to see her father emerge from the purple house. Coffee cups in hand, he and the bearded man peer under the hood of the wheelless car and chat, while the man points at things in the engine.

Madeleine sees her father turn, still talking, and look at her. The bearded man turns too and they start toward her across the street. When they reach the lemonade stand, her father says, “This is our Deutsches Mädchen.”

Her parents call her this because she picked up so much of the language, courtesy of her babysitter, with whom she went everywhere — beautiful, bespectacled and bebraided Gabrielle, of the sidecar and the one-armed father.

Mr. Froelich looks down at Madeleine and says, “Wirklich?”

“Ja,” she answers, embarrassed.

“Und hast du Centralia gern, Madeleine?”

“Um, Ich … I like it okay,” she says, seeing the German words tumble away like loose bricks as she reaches for them, turning to rubble in her memory.

“You come over to our house, Madeleine, we’ll speak Deutsch, you and I.”

He buys a glass of lemonade and drinks. “Aber das schmecht.” His black moustache glistens, his lips are red and moist. He has a smile like Santa Claus. A thin Santa Claus, with a bald spot, a black beard and shiny dark eyes. And a bit of a stoop, as though he were leaning forward, the better to hear you. He is older than the normal dads.

“The Froelichs have a girl about your age,” says her father.

Yeah, thinks Madeleine, and she has a knife. But she says politely, “Oh.”

“Ja , we do”—Mr. Froelich nods to her—“perhaps a little older.”